Senate judiciary committee votes to advance Amy Coney Barrett nomination

Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee voted unilaterally Thursday to advance Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court nomination to the full Senate despite Democrats’ refusal to sit in the hearing room for what they called a naked “power grab”.

Democratic senators had announced the night before that they would not participate in any move to install Donald Trump’s third supreme court nominee even as tens of millions of Americans vote in a presidential election less than two weeks away.

No supreme court nominee has ever been installed so close to a presidential election, and just four years ago the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and Senator Lindsey Graham, who now chairs the judiciary committee, said that installing such a nominee in an election year would be a shameful defiance of the will of voters.